Being Gender/Doing Gender, in Alice Munro and Pedro Almadovar

102 Pages·2017·1.82 MB·English

WWeesstteerrnn UUnniivveerrssiittyy
SScchhoollaarrsshhiipp@@WWeesstteerrnn
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository
9-25-2017 10:00 AM
BBeeiinngg GGeennddeerr//DDooiinngg GGeennddeerr,, iinn AAlliiccee MMuunnrroo aanndd PPeeddrroo AAllmmaaddoovvaarr
Bahareh Nadimi Farrokh, The Univesity of Western Ontario
Supervisor: Professor Christine Roulston, The University of Western Ontario
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree in
Comparative Literature
© Bahareh Nadimi Farrokh 2017
Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd
Part of the Comparative Literature Commons
RReeccoommmmeennddeedd CCiittaattiioonn
Nadimi Farrokh, Bahareh, "Being Gender/Doing Gender, in Alice Munro and Pedro Almadovar" (2017).
Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 5000.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/5000
This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted
for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of
Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected].
Abstract
In this thesis, I compare the short stories, “Boys and Girls” and “The Albanian Virgin”, by Alice
Munro, with two films, La Mala Educación and La Piel Que Habito, by Pedro Almodóvar. This
comparison analyzes how these authors conceive gender as a doing and a performance, and as
culturally constructed rather than biologically determined. My main theoretical framework is
Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity as developed in Gender Trouble: Feminism and
the Subversion of Identity. In my first chapter, I compare “Boys and Girls” with La Mala
Educación, and in the second chapter, I compare “The Albanian Virgin” with La Piel Que
Habito, to illustrate the multiple ways in which gender is constructed according to Munro and
Almodóvar. I argue that both Alice Munro and Pedro Almodóvar not only perceive gender as
non-essential, but they also locate various possibilities of resistance through gender performance,
drag, impersonation and masquerade.

Keywords

Alice Munro, Pedro Almodóvar, Judith Butler, Gender Performativity, Childhood Trauma,
Gender Resistance, Drag, Masquerade

i
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to my incredible supervisor Professor Chris Roulston for her
great advice, patience, and meticulousness. I would also like to thank my teacher Professor
Cristina Caracchini and Sylvia Kontra, our graduate assistant, who has been kind and supportive
from the moment I started my studies at Western University. I am also extremely grateful of my
parents’ support and love.
I thank my friends Pari and Gaby for always being there for me.
This thesis is dedicated to my awesome partner, Houshmand, and to my dogs, Johnny Depp and
To-Be.

ii
Table of Contents
Abstract ................................................................................................................................ i
Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... ii
Table of Contents ............................................................................................................... iii
List of Figures ..................................................................................................................... v
Introduction ........................................................................................................................ vi
Chapter 1 ............................................................................................................................. 1
1. (Un)Becoming: Learning Gender in Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls” and Pedro
Almodóvar’s La Mala Educación .................................................................................. 1
1.1. Chests with Airholes: Becoming a Girl in Alice Munro’s Short Story, “Boys and
Girls” ....................................................................................................................... 2
1.1.1. The Imposition of Gender Roles/Rules ................................................................................. 3
1.1.2. Gendered Spaces and gender Rituals ................................................................................... 7
1.1.3. Feminine Consciousness ....................................................................................................... 9
1.1.4. Preadolescences/ Gender Queerness ................................................................................. 10
1.1.5. Transgenderism/Imposed SRS ............................................................................................ 11
1.2. “It Is Me”: The Impossibility of Recognition in Pedro Almodóvar’s La Mala
Educación .............................................................................................................. 14
1.2.1. The Impossibility of Recognition: Several Versions, Multiple Avatars ................................ 18
1.2.2. Trauma: The Catholic Church .............................................................................................. 21
1.2.3. Performativity and the (Im)possibility of Subjectivity ........................................................ 25
Chapter 2 ........................................................................................................................... 35
2. Gender Performance / Gender Resistance in “The Albanian Virgin” and La Piel Que
Habito ........................................................................................................................... 35
2.1. Let’s Make a Virgin: Gender in Process in Alice Munro’s “The Albanian Virgin”36
2.1.1. (Mis)communication ........................................................................................................... 37
2.1.2. Death and Rebirth ............................................................................................................... 39
2.1.3. Death and Religion .............................................................................................................. 41
2.1.4. Gender: A Cultural Construct .............................................................................................. 42
2.1.5. Drag and Gender Rituals ..................................................................................................... 45
iii
2.1.6. Albanian Virgin: a Third Gender .......................................................................................... 48
2.1.7. Drag and Gender Performance as Resistance ..................................................................... 51
2.2. Being and Becoming; Gender Representation in Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live
In ........................................................................................................................... 54
2.2.1. Inverted Transgenderism, Inverted Horror Genre .............................................................. 55
2.2.2. Multilayer of Human Identity and Narrative Elusiveness ................................................... 58
2.2.3. The Question of an Essence ................................................................................................ 63
2.2.4. Underlying Misogyny .......................................................................................................... 64
2.2.5. Gender as Performance ...................................................................................................... 67
2.2.6. The Question of Subversion ................................................................................................ 69
2.2.7. The Gothic, the Masquerade and the Monstrous .............................................................. 71
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 78

iv
List of Figures
Figure 1: Ignacio’s Split Face ....................................................................................................... 20
Figure 2: Ignacio’s Broken Subjectivity ....................................................................................... 21
Figure 3: Ignacio and Enrique in the Movies ................................................................................ 24
Figure 4: Zahara as Sara Montiel .................................................................................................. 26
Figure 5: Juan Studying a Drag Queen ......................................................................................... 27
Figure 6: Vincent/Vera After the Vaginoplasty ............................................................................ 57
Figure 7: Vera/Vincent’s New Skin .............................................................................................. 57
Figure 8: Vera/Vincent on Dr. Ledgard’s Big Screen .................................................................. 60
Figure 9: Gala’s Monstrosity ........................................................................................................ 62
Figure 10: Zeca in a Tiger Costume ............................................................................................. 66
Figure 11: Zeca’s Torn Costume Tail ........................................................................................... 66

v
Introduction

Simplicity and at the same time denial of that simplicity. Simplicity in order to talk about
what is complex, about what happens in front of our eyes without us being able to
appreciate at first glance what is extraordinary, bizarre, terrible, grotesque, and
mysterious about it…Despite the cultural and geographic distance, I have always felt
very close to Alice Munro’s themes: the family and family relationships in a rural,
provincial, or urban setting. And also, the desire, the need to escape from all that; always
one thing and the opposite, without that meaning the slightest contradiction. (“Pedro
Almodóvar on Adapting Alice Munro”)
These are the words of Pedro Almodóvar, the Spanish director and screenwriter, admiring the
work of Alice Munro, the renowned Canadian short story writer. Alice Munro is appreciated “for
her spare and psychologically astute fiction that is deeply revealing of human nature” (Bosman).
She has changed “the architecture of short stories” with her “subtle” style, writing about life
often through portraying the lives of women and girls in rural Ontario, where she grew up
(Bosman).
Pedro Almodóvar started his career as a director and screenwriter in the late 1970s; his
films
featured transvestites, transgender people, bondage, rape, and lots of drug use and sex.
His stories blurred the lines between gay and straight, coerced and consensual, comedy
and melodrama, the funny and the repulsive, high and low art. It was all delivered with a
puzzling cheerfulness that made the movies far more transgressive than if their tone had
been serious. (Max)
vi
His films are an important part of a post-Francoist artistic movement called La Movida, an
artistic movement that took place after the Franco Era. Most of this movement took place in
Madrid “in Malasaña, a barrio of run-down warehouses and dingy clubs” (Max).
Munro and Almodóvar seem to be worlds apart, both in terms of their medium and their
style. As shown in the opening quotation, however, Almodóvar greatly admires Munro. He
explains his state of mind upon reading “Chance”, one of the stories in the short story collection,
Runaway, he says: “I remember I was completely hooked with the part on the train, what
happens on the train. I was very surprised by that section in that story, and I found it particularly
cinematic” (Champagne and Champagne). He adapted this story and two more stories from the
same collection, “Soon” and “Silent”, both of which feature the character of Juliet, Almodóvar
shot his twentieth feature film, Julieta. Almodóvar continues to praise Munro, saying:
I love her…and I love her work, but once I decided my way, the feeling was almost as
when you become independent from your family. Once I had chosen my path, I then had
to remain faithful to my own path. I was not completely faithful to Munro, but even in the
case when I changed [something] completely, I have a very strong link with her. (qtd. in
Champagne and Champagne)
Munro’s Runaway is also physically shown in the film, La Piel Que Habito (The Skin I Live In)
as one of the books Marilia sends Vera/Vincent by means of the dumbwaiter. The Runaway short
story collection is filled with women who are trapped in convoluted situations, and who have
been abandoned by their loved ones, highlighting the theme of loss.
Almodóvar and Munro both feature parts of themselves in their works. Many of Munro’s
stories have been considered to be semi-autobiographical: “She writes of turkey gutting and fox
farming, of trees felled in the Ontario wilderness, of harsh country schools and lingering
vii
illnesses, of familiar violence and obscure shame, and above all, of the lives of girls and women”
(Edemariam). The narrator of “Boys and Girls”, with a fox farmer father, echoes Munro’s
childhood; Munro’s father was also a fox farmer in a small town in Southern Ontario.
Almodóvar, in turn, attended Catholic boarding school, just like Ignacio and Enrique, and one of
the priests used to sexually abuse the boys. As Almodóvar reminisces: “The act of kissing the
priest’s ring filled [me] with repulsion; [I] could almost literally see their hands dirtied with
sperm” (Max). Similar to the female narrator of the short story, “Boys and Girls”, Munro
struggled with the imposed gender roles and the pressure of being ‘appropriate’: “I had a lot of
conflict with [my mother], from the time I was a very young child, because she had an ideal of
good behavior. She wanted her daughters to be successful, but also, she wanted us to be sexually
very pure. And ladylike; being a lady was very important. She wanted me to shine in a way I was
not prepared to” (Edemariam). Munro’s short stories are “capacious” and concise and they are as
extensive as novels (Hollinghurst).
This thesis is a comparative study of Pedro Almodóvar’s two films, La Mala Educación
(2004) and La Piel Que Habito (2013), and Alice Munro’s two short stories, “Boys and Girls”
(1968) and “The Albanian Virgin” (1994). La Mala Educación is Almodóvar’s fourteenth
feature film, and encompasses the themes of child abuse by the Spanish Catholic church, this
patriarchal church functioning as the locus of trauma and of multiple identities. Within this
context, Almodóvar creates a film within film, and a narrative of gender ambiguity and murder.
La Piel Que Habito is Almodóvar’s seventeenth film. The main themes of the film are transition
and transgenderism, gender resistance and “gender doing” versus gender essence, and an
exploration of the multiple layers of human identity within a misogynistic society. Munro’s
“Boys and Girls” was published in the short story collection, Dance of the Happy Shades. The
viii
main themes of this story are gender roles and the imposition of gender roles, the inevitability of
the process of gendering by cultural and societal rules, and childhood trauma. “The Albanian
Virgin”, which was published within the short story collection, Open Secrets, focuses on the
themes of transitioning and transgenderism, gender ambiguity, and the possibility of resistance in
difficult situations. I will analyze these works in the context of Judith Butler’s theory of gender
performativity, illustrated in her seminal work, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity (1990). I will argue that these works demonstrate the cultural construction of gender and
its flux and fluidity as opposed to a fixed binary idea of gender.
As the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013, Alice Munro is a renowned
author, and numerous studies have been done of her work. However, I have not come across a
critique focused on her specific view of gender as a social and cultural construct, and as a
precarious and mutable state. In contrast, Pedro Almodóvar has always been known for
challenging the hegemonic system of gender and sexuality, and for promoting a transitory and
shifting approach to these categories. These authors are perfect for this study because of their
different ways of critiquing gender, and, as importantly, because of the different media each
creator has used: the short story and film.
Both Munro and Almodóvar use a nonlinear form of narration in the works I will be
discussing. The Bad Education (La Mala Educación), “The Albanian Virgin”, and (The Skin I
Live In) La Piel Que Habito have more than two narrators. “Boys and Girls” is narrated by just
one person, but it also has another layer. The unnamed female narrator of the story is an adult
woman reminiscing about the events of one year in her childhood. Therefore, the story is
sometimes narrated by her and sometimes by her young preadolescent persona. In all of these
works, there are multiple narrators with different points of view and different perspectives on the
ix